Study Advice for 2018 (6th Edition)?

Study Advice for 2018 (6th Edition)?

First, has anyone passed the latest version (based on PMBOK 6th Ed.)? If so, what did you use to study? Are the variances between the 5th and 6th edition enough for me to fail if I do not study any 6th edition material?

Here we go. The write-ups in this forum are not as good as some of the other technical certs, so help me get this going for 2018 and the latest test.

From what I’ve gathered so far the two best books are:
Rita Mulcahy’s and Andy Crowe’s, respectively:

Audio: PM PrepCast (ol’ Cornelius) - The car rides have never been so much fun… I feel like the lessons aren’t sinking in, so I give this a C+. It might help listening to them outside the car, but I probably won’t.

Am I on the right track? Am I missing anything? Would any flash card packs be beneficial?

If anything, I hope this helps anyone who is just starting to make a game plan for taking the PMP. I’ve done a lot of homework for you already. Just keep in mind that at the time of this writing version six is brand new so we are in a weird transition period and lacking a lot of up-to-date material.

Decided to go with Kim Heldman's newest book (9th Ed.) because it is free to me on Safari Books. If you know someone in the military they can sponsor you for an account and you can get to Safari books. If you are military you should already know about this, if not feel free to respond to this post and I can point you in the right direction.

At this point in time Rita's book is $76, Andy's is a ridiculous $92, and Kim's is less than $40. Kim's book usually comes in third place, probably because it is Sybex.

I'm also going to chance it and drive on without the newest version of the PMBOK, hopefully Kim's book is enough. I'll let you know either way.

If I had to do this exam all over again, this is what I would/n't do again:

Material Used

1. PMBOK - I didn't actually use this book too much for focused studying.
Note: I'm working on my masters in PMGT and we used the PMBOK essentially as a template to write practice project charters, components within the project management plan (example: Collect Requirements, WBS, Quality Management Plan, Plan Risk Response). I didn't study/memorize ITTOs, I essentially was putting them into practice.

2. Rita - Primary source for studying. I condensed her 650-something page book into approximately 200 large flashcards, because I felt like there was a lot of fluff that was important to tell a story, but after the first read needed to be condensed to just the facts. I then took those 200 flashcards and created 15 visual note drawings to outline each process group / knowledge area. These visual notes served as my brain-dump practice during the last 2 weeks leading up to the exam. I drew them over and over again...1000s of times.

3. Joseph Phillips Udemy Course - This is a great resource in conjunction with Rita. At 12USD for the course, this was hands down the best bang for the buck. It might come off as confusing, but I thought the instructor did a really good job of explaining how you need to think about the material. For instance, the first time you pick up the PMBOK, you'd assume the 47 (5th edition) / 49 (6th edition) process chart should be studied from left to right, because that is how the book is organized. The reality is that you need to study for the exam using a vertical approach. Studying the sections under 'Initiating' exclusively, before moving to Section 4.2 because then you're moving into the 'Planning' phase.

Speaking of 'Planning' phase. Another key point Phillips points out is how to rank your study priorities. For example, you'd think that 'Planning' would the most important process group to study because has 24 processes. Well, consider that Planning makes up 24% of the exam and at 200 questions, the Planning phase breaks down to 2 questions per process. Conversely, 'Executing' had 8 processes and made up 31% of the exam or 62 questions, breaking down to almost 8 questions per process.

If you had a week to study for the exam, which of the two sections would you probably spend more time focusing on? Executing, right?

4. Rita Process Map Game - I found this on the RMC website and purposely waited until the week of the exam to really work with it, because I wanted to use it as my light review. In retrospect, I would have hammered this earlier. Using the Pareto Law, I felt like this is where 80% of my questions came from on the actual exam.

5. PM Exam Simulator ($125) - I used this the last month of my preparation. I have one positive and two negative thoughts about this software. The positive, I thought the questions within the software were incredibly close to the look, style, and feel of what I faced on the actual exam. Minor negative, the simulator doesn't have a feature to highlight or cross-out portions of the question like the real exam. Fortunately, this was really easy to pick up on the exam.

Huge negative, even though the questions were close to what I faced, the answer section was not. A lot of times, I thought the questions were too easy, because there was one answer that was so obvious that I questioned if I needed to actually read any of the material. You're not going to face too many questions on the exam with one obvious answer, a large majority of them will have at least 2 and several with 3 possible answers. This is where I felt the Simulator fell short in my preparation.

Exam Experience

I started at 7:30AM and ran through the first 25 questions and marked several, knowing that I wasn't in a testing frame of mind yet. After the 25 questions, I ran back through them again and left about 3 marked. This put me behind the pace by about 15 minutes. I decided I would save all the math questions for the end and snap-marked them moving forward. I took 3 emergency breaks and finished all 200 questions with about 20 minutes left. I had probably 20 questions marked, reviewed about 12-14 of those before I ran out of gas mentally. My original plan was to let the clock wind down to zero, but I got to the 4 minute mark and knew I wasn't going to put in maximum effort.

This is the best part of my story, so I hope you all stuck around for this

So I click the 'End Exam' button and the screen starts to cycle. Its spinning and spinning. This was the only time throughout the day where I said to myself, ****...I failed. Its still spinning. I can't even look at the screen. I'm doing one of those looks where, your neighbor's little kid is naked and you're desperately trying NOT to look. You know the look I'm talking about. My screen refreshes, but it takes like 10 seconds for the screen to pop-up and...

So I click the 'Next' button and same range of emotions repeat. After 20-30 seconds, my results finally show up with a blue screen and black letters congratulating me. I passed with an overall 'Above Target' rating, with 4/5 of my scores being 'Above Target', and Execution being on 'Target'.

Awesome write-up! Thank you! It's good to hear from someone who has taken the latest test. Also, the other write-ups in this forum (no offense to anyone who wrote one), were not very detailed or of much substance. I will heed all of your advice. Congratulations! On a random note I just noticed, I might know you, I live in Charleston too. SPAWARrior?

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